Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

Having witnessed the demise of several cultural publications, I was thrilled to receive a copy of a new magazine, the Autumn 2005 issue of Slightly Foxed, which bills itself "The Real Readers' Quarterly". I must admit that, not having seen the first issue, I don't quite know what the title of the magazine means. This number was sent to me by an old friend, Peter McKenzie- Smith, who was for a number of years on the staff of the British Council in Cairo.

Judging by the 18 contributions and the diversity of the subjects dealt with in the issue, the magazine is what it claims to be in its subtitle. Slightly Foxed is in 90 pages only which reflects the brevity of the articles, which range from three to six pages of the small size. I must admit that most of the contributors are unknown to me, the exception being Penelope Lively whom I had the pleasure of meeting a while back. Among several prizes Lively was awarded, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Moon Tiger, published in 1987.

Lively was born in Cairo, and Moon Tiger is an extended meditation by a fictional popular woman historian who is dying in a London hospital. Through dreams and remembered conversations, the novel builds up her story, dwelling in particular on an encounter, one that grew into a tragic love-affair, when she was a war corespondent during the Alamein campaign. Livery's article in Slightly Foxed is about the English novelist William Golding, the Nobel Prize winner who visited Egypt and wrote four books about the country. I remember meeting him at the headquarters of the English Centre of PEN in Chelsea.

Golding admits a life- long attachment to Egypt since his school days. In spite of his attachment to Egypt and his novella The Scorpion King, which is about a Pharaoh, Golding did not visit the country until he was past his middle years. When he was asked to write a book about Egypt he gladly agreed, and published in 1985 An Egyptian Journal. It is a return to the traveller's tale approach, a generalised personal diary of every day events, with its reflections, observations and descriptions of the usual hazards and eccentricities of living aboard a motor boat in a journey from Cairo to Luxor and back. Many of the accompanying photographs are his own, others from more professional hands.

In his Egyptian Journal, Golding describes Egypt as "a land of wonderful beauty" and regrets what he sees as an indifference by its inhabitants to that beauty. Summing up his description of the book, he speaks of the desire to see it all and have an opinion on everything as a mistake. Instead, he tried in the book to construct the encounter of "two widely differing sets of experience" by keeping an extended journal and consulting his notes to recapture the minutiae of his journey.

In her article about him, Lively discusses Golding's "oeuvre" of 15 books, including a play, and an unfinished novel. She describes "the modesty of the pile through which I have worked, and the brevity of the books". Golding, she says, pares fiction "down to bony essentials", producing "an entire universe" in the 220 pages of Lord of the Flies. I will not attempt to summarise Lively's article about Golding, but a comment she makes, one that I would describe as "wise saying", should be cited here. "A relationship with a book," she claims, "is like that of a friend." On first acquaintance, one quality catches one's attention; with familiarity one registers new aspects of the personality. Lively was commenting on her re- reading of Golding's Lord of the Flies.